The Year of Rice and Salt

The Qing authorities who had survived the jahriya ambush had Ma Mingxin shown on the town walls, and his followers cried out to see his chains, and prostrated themselves, crying 'Shaikh! Shaikh!' audibly from across the river and from the hilltops overlooking the town. Having thus identified the rebels' leader definitively, the authorities had him hauled down off the wall and beheaded.

When the jahriya learned what had happened they were frantic for revenge. They had no equipment for a proper siege of Lanzhou, so they built a fort on a nearby hill, and began systematically to attack any movement into or out of the city walls. The Qing officials in Beijing were informed of the harassment, and they reacted angrily to this assault on a provincial capital, and sent out imperial Commissioner Agui, one of the Qianlong's senior military governors, to pacify the region.

This he failed to do, and life in Lanzhou grew lean and cold. Finally Agui sent Hushen, his chief military officer, back to Beijing, and when he came back out with new imperial orders, he called up a very large armed militia of Gansu Tibetans, also Alashan Mongols, and all the men from the other Green Standard garrisons in the region. Such ferocious huge men now walked the streets of the town that it seemed it was only a big barracks. 'It's an old Han technique,' Ibrahim said with some bitterness. 'Pit the non Hans against each other out on the frontier, and let them kill each other.'

Thus reinforced, Agui was able to cut off the water supply from the jahriyas' hilltop fort across the river, and the tables were turned; besieger became besieged, as in a game of go. At the end of three months, word came into town that the final battle had occurred, and Su Forty three and every single one of his thousands of men had been killed.

Ibrahim was gloomy at this news. 'That won't be the end of it. They'll want revenge for Ma Mingxin, and for those men. The more the jahriya are put down, the more young Muslim men will turn to them. The oppression itself makes the rebellion!'

'It's like the soul stealing craze,' Kang noted.

Ibrahim nodded, and redoubled his efforts on his books. It was as though if he could only reconcile the two civilizations on paper, the bloody battles happening all around them would come to an end. So he wrote many hours each day, ignoring the meals set on his table by the servants. His conversations with Kang were extensions of his day's thought; and conversely, what his wife said to him in these conversa tions was often quickly incorporated into his books. No one else's opin ions were so important to him. Kang would curse the young Muslim fighters, and say, 'You Muslims are too religious, to kill and die as you are doing, and all for such puny differences in dogma, it's crazy!'

'Mohammed Meets Confucius': presumably the work in five volumes published in the sixtieth year of the Qianlong as 'Reconciliation of the Philosophies of Liu Zhi and Ma Mingxin'.